The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to embodiments of the claimed inventions.
For computing devices—e.g., a mobile computing device, a navigation device, a smartphone, etc., a “point of interest” (POI) query describes a query by a user of a computing device to identify geo-locations that are of particular interest to the user. The user may identify potential POIs by location name, service provided, location type, etc. Potential POIs may further be limited by their distance from a user's current location or distance from a location specified by the user's query.
Attributes of various geo-locations may be stored in a database included in or accessible by a computing device. These attributes may also include location information for each geo-location. An example of location information data is the geographic coordinate system of latitude, longitude, and elevation (i.e., altitude).
Disadvantages of utilizing multiple coordinates (such as latitude, longitude, elevation) to store location information data include maintaining a plurality of variables to represent a location, and computation-intensive operations to determine a distance value between two or more geo-locations.